


Verity Vengeful

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Kidnapped Castiel, Love Confessions, M/M, Monster of the Week, Newly Human Castiel, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, unspecified season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-01 23:49:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13305936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: An argument with Dean spurs a recently fallen Cas to prove he can be useful as a human by finding his own hunt. But when he’s taken by the unknown creature he’s hunting, Sam and Dean have to race to his rescue. Only it turns out this monster feeds on secrets, and the secrets Cas has been keeping may be too deeply hidden for him to be saved.





	Verity Vengeful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wingsdestiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingsdestiel/gifts).



When Sam walked into the kitchen early on a Saturday morning and found Cas sitting at the table with his laptop open and a pensive look on his face, he knew something was up. Cas being Cas, particularly a Cas who was slowly adjusting to life in a human body, there was a wide range of things that could have been bothering him. Since coming to live at the bunker, his early morning questions for Sam had ranged from political issues of the day to cooking techniques, and every single one of them had him looking just as personally troubled before he brought it up.

Sam skipped the guessing game – unlike Dean, Cas was refreshingly willing to answer straightforward questions – and asked, “Something on your mind, Cas?”

“I think I’ve found a case.”

Helping himself to the half-full pot of coffee, Sam pulled up the chair next to Cas and leaned over to see what he had up. “Tell me about it.”

They hadn’t been actively looking for hunts for a while, wanting to give Cas more time to settle in. But if he was the one finding them, that seemed like a pretty good indication that he was ready. As long as it wasn’t something too complicated, he could probably even tag along and help out.

“Three people have been found dead in a small county in Iowa over the past eighteen months. They went missing first, four to seven months before their bodies were found. Vanished from their beds with no evidence left behind, one with his wife sleeping next to him who claims not to have seen or heard anything.”

Sam skimmed along as Cas explained. He’d found a local forum, rather than a nevs story, but the details were all there. Some of them were probably even more accurate for coming directly from the source. It was a good find.

Cas wasn’t done. “The first one was found the day before the second went missing, the second a few days after the third. The third body was found yesterday.”

“And?” He thought he could tell where it was going.

“Another disappearance last night,” Cas confirmed.

Nodding, Sam stood. “Okay. I’ll tell Dean to get ready. Do we know how quickly they’re killed? How much time do we have?” he asked over his shoulder on the way out.

“The bodies have all been mummified. Dessicated. But, Sam...”

Cas’s hesitant voice made him turn; Cas’s blank, almost angry expression made him worry. “I’m going alone.”

Sam backtracked and leaned on the table to get closer to Cas’s level without sitting down again. “What are you talking about?”

“I need to do this by myself.”

“Cas.” Sam shook his head. “No. You don’t have to do or – or prove anything. If you want to do this hunt, fine, but we should go together.”

Resolute, Cas closed his laptop and stood. “That’s kind of you to say, but I think we both know it isn’t true. I won’t be a deadweight, and I’m not useless without my grace. I do need to prove something: I need to prove I can be a hunter, survive as a hunter, without you or Dean holding my hand.”

The way Cas inflected the last few words didn’t sound like him, but it was definitely familiar. It had Dean in a bitchy mood all over it. Sam scrubbed a hand through his hair and sighed explosively.

“Cas, whatever he said – he didn’t mean it. You’re family, we’re here for you whether you have your mojo or not.”

Cas’s eyes dropped to the side. “Not.”

“What—”

“I will never have my _mojo_ again. It’s gone. Irrevocably, even if I wanted it back.”

“Which you... don’t?” Sam guessed tentatively. Cas nodded. “And that’s what you and Dean were fighting about.”

Cas didn’t answer outright, but his quiet, “I need to do this, Sam,” was clear enough.

“Fine. But call us – call me – if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” Straightening and stretching, Sam said, “You have to tell Dean yourself.”

♡

Dean was insufferable after Cas left – not that he’d tried to stop him from going. Sam hadn’t been present for the start of that conversation, but he caught the escalating end of it even from a floor below, and the outer door had slammed resoundingly shut only moments after Dean yelled, “Fine! Don’t come crying to us when you get fucking killed, then!”

After a full day of him stomping around, snapping any time Sam made a noise in his vicinity and glaring at his phone like it was responsible for Cas not sending it a text, Sam gave up on interacting with him and retreated to the library and let Dean stew by alone. He had no one but himself to blame for Cas’s stubborn need to prove his hunting prowess; Sam had never called their friend a baby in a trenchcoat or accused him of being a liability.

It wasn’t long before he’d exhausted the things he wanted to get done, though. The index of known demons, dead and alive, had fallen far out of date after the massacre of the Men of Letters, but a few months of sporadic updates had taken care of that. He browsed for potential hunts nearby, but there was nothing promising close. Leaving Dean with his self-imposed angst might serve him right, but he’d probably just get drunk and either mope or break things.

Out of other ideas and wanting to check in, he texted Cas.

**How’s it going? Any leads?**

His phone rang almost immediately, flashing a picture of Cas he’d snapped when the then-angel had been preoccupied by an intense staring contest with a vending machine. Shortly after the picture was taken, Cas had given up trying to feed it the wrinkled bill from Dean and instead used his grace to force several bags of Funyuns out.

Sam answered the call, but before he could say anything, Cas grumbled, “I’m handling it, Sam.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Sam hurried to reassure him. “But handling it doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. We’re a team and this is an unknown. Dean doesn’t have to know,” he added when Cas still hesitated. “But you know he gets help with research all the time.”

Another moment of quiet contemplation, then Cas started to fill him in. No connections had been found yet between the victims, but he had some new information on the latest disappearance.

“I don’t know if it’s relevant yet, but she had a substantial drug habit. The officers investigating her disappearance found quite a stash in her house.”

They wrapped up the conversation not long after that – Cas had a meeting with the coroner in the morning – but he promised to keep Sam updated.

♡

Cas didn’t call the next day. Sam gave him an hour after he’d said he would, then another, then Dean’s grumpy antsiness and his own worry won out and he sent Cas a text that went unanswered. As did the next one, and his two attempts to call.

He didn’t like it. Cas was still adjusting to his permanent humanity, probably still upset from his argument with Dean, and they still hadn’t figured out what he was even hunting. If everything was okay, Cas probably wouldn’t thank him for interfering, but Sam could deal with the fallout from that. He wasn’t willing to take the chance of something bad happening to Cas.

Not only would Sam lose one of his best and only friends, but Dean would never forgive himself.

The coroner’s office seemed like the best place to start; he knew Cas had been going there, so either his meeting had run remarkably long and he was still there or they’d be able to tell him when Cas had left, maybe even where he’d been going. But when he called and introduced himself as FBI, looking for his fellow agent, the coroner he got transferred to couldn’t tell him any of that.

“Agent Swift was a no-show for our appointment.” She sounded distracted, a tapping in the background that was loud but arhythmic. “Called him but the number he gave me – no, no, no you do not get to just – sorry, just a second.” Something clattered, then crashed, and the tapping stopped. “Sorry. It went to the front desk of his motel, and they said they hadn’t seen him this morning and couldn’t get an answer on his room phone.”

It took a lot of willpower to keep himself from swearing, but Sam held it together until he’d gotten the name and number of the motel from her and hung up. Calling in himself and confirming that no one had seen ‘Agent Swift’, and even getting them to check the room (empty of Cas but not his things, including his cell phone on the bedside table) was the easy part; after that, he had to break the news to Dean.

♡

Less than five hours later, they were inside Cas’s room, searching his stuff for a clue. Well, Sam was searching. Dean was pacing and muttering and silently recriminating himself, which was helping neither the situation nor Sam’s concentration.

“Hey,” Sam said, stopping Dean in his tracks. “I’ve got things here. Why don’t you go check with that coroner, see if she has anything that’ll help us narrow down what we’re dealing with.”

Dean’s mouth opened, closed; his eyebrows relaxed a bit from their angry glare. Licking his lips, he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Call me if you find anything, all right?”

“Of course.”

Dean left and Sam felt like he could breathe again. He understood why his brother was so spun out, it wasn’t like he wasn’t worried too, but the weight of Dean’s emotions was too much. And the most frustrating part was that no amount of blaming himself would actually get him to act on his feelings if – when – they found Cas. He’d just bury it down again until it led to another blow-out like that one that made Cas leave in the first place.

Sighing, Sam put that out of his mind and picked up Cas’s phone. The lock screen showed all his and Dean’s texts and calls; Cas hadn’t gotten any of them. He frowned at the keypad, then hit 1-2-3-4.

It unlocked.

Ignoring for the moment Cas’s terrible security measure, especially since it proved helpful, Sam instead focused on the search history, running a couple of them again. Either Cas had found a new lead after talking to him, or he’d wanted to keep it from Sam for some reason, because he hit what seemed to be the jackpot.

A series of similar disappearances and deaths in Indiana a hundred years before, Tennessee a century before that, all the way back to Virginia in the 1600s. It looked like Cas had even found a name for what he was hunting, and as Sam read through the pages Cas had pulled up on the creature, he was simultaneously impressed and even more worried.

For a guy who was barely as technologically literate as Dean, Cas had found a lot of what he was looking for online. Just from that info, Sam was more sure than ever that Cas had been taken by the very thing he was hunting. And he knew why.

♡

“Say that again.”

Sam knew that tone. That wasn’t a questioning tone, that was Dean when he’d already gotten an answer, didn’t like it, and was demanding a better one. Unfortunately for both of them, Sam didn’t have a better answer to give him.

“Verity Vengeful. At least, according to the puritans whose colony got decimated in early Virginia. But she – or they? It’s not really clear if it’s a single being or a kind of monster, only one has ever been seen at a time – shows up in cautionary tales from all over the world. The common thread is that she feeds on secrets. Feeds on people with secrets.”

Dean’s frustrated growl rang down the line. “Everyone’s got secrets, Sam, but Cas is an open freaking book. Can you give me something actually helpful? The doc was pretty much a dead end.”

It was time for the part that he knew Dean would react badly to – react worse to, since he already wasn’t taking the news well. But there was no way around telling Dean the truth; Dean needed the information to hunt, and Sam needed to not risk making himself the next victim by keeping things to himself.

“There’s more to it than that. It’s not just run-of-the-mill, everyday secrets or lies. These are... By all accounts, these are the big, destructive kinds of secrets. Things that would ruin people’s lives when they got out. The latest victim’s drug addiction might be what got her targeted. Undiscovered crimes, illegitimate children, uh. Couple men living as women and women living as men.”

“Well I think we can rule out nephilim and crossdressing,” Dean snapped. “And the last time Cas had a secret that big, he was making a play for Purgatory with Crowley and acting shifty the whole time. He’s been grounded with us for months, we would’ve noticed something different going on.”

They probably would’ve, too; Cas had kept that from them mostly through avoidance, not lying to their faces. But if what Sam suspected was true, it wasn’t a new secret Cas was hiding. It was at least as old as the deal with Crowley, maybe older.

Because Sam didn’t know exactly when the angel had fallen in love with his brother, but he did know it had been a very long time for a thing like that to go unsaid. Cas had to have his reasons for it, and Sam didn’t necessarily blame him – even he didn’t know how Dean would react, despite Dean’s own feelings. But he wished he’d talked to Cas about it at some point, because maybe then it wouldn’t have been a big enough secret to bring him to the monster’s attention.

“Does it matter?” Sam asked. He couldn’t imagine any secret that would make Dean turn his back on Cas; even something as dark and misguided as his work with Crowley.

Dean surprised him at first by saying, “Yes, of course it does.” But he added, “If it wasn’t this thing that took him, I don’t want to waste time tracking it down,” and proved Sam right after all.

“It’s the best lead we have,” Sam argued. “So unless and until something else comes up...”

“Right. Okay. Uh, anything on how to kill the vengeful whatever?”

Maybe if he’d had good news, Sam would’ve corrected him. Instead, he had to admit, “No. Only a few sightings, no record of anyone fighting or killing one.”

“Great.” Dean’s breath huffed in Sam’s ear. “Well then we’ll just bring everything we have. The bodies have all been dumped in the same area, about a half-mile radius. Local cops haven’t found anything, but maybe we’ll pick up something they missed. You want me to swing by and pick you up, or do you have more stuff to do there?”

Looking around, there didn’t seem to be notes or research that wasn’t on Cas’s phone. So he pocketed that and told Dean, “No, there’s not much here and you shouldn’t go alone.”

Even if the creature took its victims at night, there was nothing to say it wouldn’t or couldn’t latch onto someone who sought it out. Dean was sure to be just as appetizing a target as Cas, if the selection was based on his own opinion. Just like Cas, Dean had feelings he hadn’t acted on. The only thing Sam wasn’t sure of in Dean’s case was whether he was still in denial, and if so, whether that would make him more or less appealing as a target.

He didn’t plan to give Verity Vengeful the chance to answer his question.

♡

Scouring nearly a square mile of forest with fully equipped duffle bags slung across their backs was a pain, but one that paid off when the EMF reader started going crazy in Sam’s hand. He and Dean exchanged a look.

“Ghost?” Dean mouthed at him, and Sam could only shrug.

By unspoken agreement they paused there, Sam keeping an eye out while Dean traded his machete for an iron fire poker. Sam’s gun already had salt rounds in it; Dean’s had silver. As Dean zipped up his bag, Sam spun in a slow circle. The static noise of the reading got stronger to the north, so he nodded that way and Dean took point, poker at the ready, as they followed the trail.

It led them outside the range they’d been searching in – and the area the cops had been looking in – by over a mile, through trees and across a small creek. They splashed straight through it, because there was no bridge in sight and it was only a couple feet deep, but too wide to jump. From there, it was only a few more yards before they saw the hut.

The EMF reading spiked when Sam swung it in that direction.

Stopping just short of the clearing that opened around the hut, Dean waited for Sam to catch up to him and spoke in a low, urgent whisper. “Put that away, get – hell, I don’t know. Some kind of weapon, anything you think’ll work. Then check around back, I’ll go in the front.”

“I don’t think we should split up,” Sam tried to warn, but Dean was already pushing forward to the small cabin’s closed door.

There wasn’t much to do but drop his bag, pull out the first thing that seemed useful – a machete, since Dean had forgone his – and circle around the back. He came up empty; the windows were all blocked off with dark curtains and there were no other doors into what looked to be a single room cottage.

By the time he got back around, the door was open and Dean was inside, kneeling just at the edge of a square of light streaming in from the outside. The rest of the hut was too dark for Sam to see what he was doing.

“Dean?” he called as he approached.

“We’re clear. Cas is here, no sign of the thing that took him.”

Despite the news being good, Dean didn’t sound as relieved as Sam would’ve expected. Edging closer without lowering his guard, since he could see Dean’s poker on the ground a few inches away from his feet, Sam found a better angle to see what was going on inside.

Stretched on the floor in front of Dean, Cas was awake but pale and shaking, barely moving despite not seeming to be restricted in any way. Every few breaths carried a groan of pain unsuccessfully subdued behind clenched teeth.

Dean looked up at him, scowling with frustrated worry. “He can’t move. I can’t move him, it’s like something is pinning him down or something.”

“Her,” Cas ground out. Sweat dripped down his forehead as he shuddered. “She has a way to – some kind of power over me. I came here on my own, I walked here in the dark, and I didn’t know why until she was here.”

“Mind control? Some kind of hypnosis or semi-possession?” Sam guessed.

“But that shouldn’t stop me from picking him up.” Dean sat back on his heels. Scratching the hair at the back of his head, he asked, “Got any bright ideas?”

As a matter of fact, he did.

“Yeah. Keep an eye out for visitors while I check something, okay?”

Dean moved back so Sam could take the space next to Cas instead, and stood just outside the door with his iron held at the ready.

Kneeling beside Cas, Sam tried to get an arm under him just to check, but it was like Dean had said. He couldn’t even wedge Cas up enough to get a hand beneath him and the floor, never mind enough leverage to lift him. Some invisible force held him down as effectively as any physical restraint.

“She’s the one you found in your research, right?” he asked Cas. “The secret eater.”

Cas nodded. “I don’t know where the woman she took before me is. The room was empty when I got here. Is she – did they find her?” He sounded more upset about that possibility than his own abduction and potential death. Maybe because it meant failing someone else, maybe because it meant it meant failing Dean specifically.

Either way, it made Sam feel that much worse to not have a definite answer. “I don’t know. But we came through her usual dumping grounds and there was no one there.”

Cas’s face relaxed at that, if only slightly. But the tight, pained look returned as soon as Sam said, “You need to tell us. The secret that she’s holding over you, maybe if it stops being a secret it’ll break her hold.”

“I can’t.” Cas turned away even as Sam leaned closer to look at him. “Sam, I – I can’t.”

“You have to,” Sam pressed.

Cas’s eyes cut to Dean, then away, and he shook his head. When Sam glanced over, he found Dean glaring in their direction instead of looking out for trouble.

“Out with it, Cas,” Dean ordered. “Whatever it is, it ain’t worth dying over.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew.”

Sam could see the moment Dean snapped, overwhelmed with concern and determined to hide it behind his bad temper, but Dean saying something needlessly cruel Cas right then would only make things worse. Maybe irrevocably.

He stood, putting himself between the two men and distracting Dean’s attention enough that whatever he ultimatum he’d been about to hurl stopped in its tracks. “Enough. Dean, I’m sorry, but it’s kind of your fault Cas ended up here and doesn’t think he can get himself out, so you need to fix it.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Sam?”

“I mean I know Cas’s secret, and I know your secret, and you’d know they were the same if you’d just get your head out of your ass.” Dean was set to bluster back, eyebrows furrowed and face red, so Sam pressed on. “Tell him how you feel, Dean. Tell Cas how you feel about him right now or he might die because he thinks you’ll reject him.”

Blanching, Dean took a step back. “I—”

“No.” Sam strode forward and grabbed him by the shirt, pulling him around to stand over Cas. “Look at him. He’s hurting and scared and you can stop it, Dean. You can save him, because he loves you!”

After barely a second of gaping, Dean dropped to his knees next to Cas and started whispering to him, low and frantic and passionate. Sam took a few steps away; they deserved all the privacy Sam could afford to give them, now that he’d ripped away the last vestiges of denial away and forced them into it.

“I could have eaten him for a year,” a female voice said beside him. She sounded more wistful than angry, and when Sam spun to face her she only stood there, watching Dean and Cas speak without moving to interrupt. Nothing immediately stood out about her – she just looked like an average woman, wearing modern clothes – but her eyes, when she turned them on Sam, were gray all the way through.

Sam swung the machete up to her neck, stopping just shy of cutting in, and she didn’t even flinch. “Where’s the other one you took?”

“She’ll be free once I’m gone,” Verity said without losing any trace of her calm. “She can make her way home easily enough.”

“So are you going to tell me how to kill you, too?” He might even have believed it, if she did. She seemed ready.

“You already have.” She looked away from him, back to Dean and Cas, and smiled sadly. “He was so desperate to keep his secret. So sure he’d lose what he had left; so little, in the grand scheme of things. So much, to him.”

“He won’t.”

“No,” she agreed, “that’s why I chose him. I have sisters, Sam Winchester. There are hundreds of us, and we can’t help who we are. We can’t stop the compulsion to feed. But all we want, all of us, is to be the truth instead of the secret. We want to be set free.”

“I love you, Dean,” Cas said then, loud and strong enough to carry to Sam and Verity.

Her smile widening, softening to pure joy, she closed her eyes and faded into pale swirls of light. Inside her cottage, Cas sat up to claim a long overdue first kiss.


End file.
